Update Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool

Version 2018 now available

Deforestation is an important global problem: it has severe negative impacts on the planet and contributes to climate change. Deforestation is a form of land use change. A well-known example of deforestation is for the cultivation of agricultural crops, such as soy and oil palm. Approximately 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to land use change. However, calculating greenhouse gas emissions from land use change for a given crop in a particular country presents researchers with a huge challenge. In many cases there are simply no primary data. Our Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool offers a solution.

Calculation of greenhouse gas emissions from land use change

In many cases a lack of primary data makes it difficult to calculate the impact of land use change for a specific crop in a specific country. Global or country-specific estimates based on statistics and satellite imagery are available, but making an estimate for a specific crop and country remains a challenge. Blonk Consultants has developed the Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool to support researchers and other interested parties.

Three functions

The Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool is an Excel tool that provides a predefined calculation method to determine greenhouse gas emissions caused by land use change for crop cultivation. The tool has three basic functions, based on three different scenarios related to the availability of user data:

Country known & land use unknown: This estimate is based on a number of reference land use scenarios combined with data from relative crop-country extensions from FAO statistics.

Country & land use unknown: A weighted average is determined on the basis of FAO statistics. The methodology used is the same as for ‘country known & land use unknown.’

Country & land use known: This approach is described in PAS 2050-1 (published by BSI). The tool uses various IPCC data sources.

Update: Version 2018

The Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool is regularly updated as new data become available. Version 2018 is now available and contains FAO statistics up to 2016. Many of the background data have been adapted, such as the reported areas, forest statistics and estimates of biomass carbon stocks in forests. In the table we give you a preview of the new results for selected countries and crops and some additional insights into the changes compared to previous versions.

Complete dataset (Version 2018): 9000+ crop- country combinations

It is possible to access the complete updated dataset. The dataset contains more than 9,000 country and crop combinations for the functionality ‘land know & land use unknown’. The dataset can be purchased from our tool portal. This gives you access to various documents containing the data (Excel) and pdf file.

Your investment: 130 euro (ex. VAT)

The complete dataset is available via the Blonk Consultants tool portal.

About Agri-footprint

Agri-footprint is a high quality and comprehensive life cycle inventory (LCI) database, focused on the agriculture and food sector. It covers data on agricultural products: feed, food and biomass and is used by life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners. In total the database contains approximately 5,000 products and processes. In the last years Agri-footprint is widely accepted by the food industry, LCA community, scientific community and governments worldwide and has been critically reviewed.